LIVES WELL LIVED: LEWIS B. PULLER JR.

LIVES WELL LIVED: LEWIS B. PULLER JR.; Coming Home

By Michael Norman

Published: January 1, 1995

1946-1994 Lewis Burwell Puller Jr. picked up a gun one afternoon last May and killed himself. He was 48, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 1991 autobiography, "Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet." His father was the late Gen. Chesty Puller, the most decorated Marine in history. To those who fought in Vietnam, the son displayed a different kind of heroism -- attesting to the horror of war. Michael Norman

I NEVER MET OR TALKED TO LEW PULLER, BUT I KNEW him, the woeful part of him anyway. We fought on the same ground at the same time, I-Corps, Vietnam, in the bloody year 1968. I came home whole however. He came home a mess, both legs gone, hands mangled, guts in a knot, his loss literally the result of a misstep, a booby trap.

His recovery -- if it can be called that -- was long and hard. Between operations and hospital stays, he fought addictions to liquor and painkillers. Along the way, he tried to commit suicide but got so drunk preparing himself he failed. He didn't make the same mistake twice. His friends and family said he had been despondent over the breakup of his marriage and a certain inertia that had crept into his life. But I think it might have been something else.

For men with blood on their hands, men stained by the butchery of combat, the real fight for survival starts when the guns grow silent. For us, suicide is a chronic afterthought, a dark idea that follows dark memories. Most of us resist the incessant impulse to destroy ourselves, but many of our comrades, too many, do not. They lose the war long after the fighting has stopped.

At the very end of his book -- in his last line, in fact -- Lew Puller takes as his coda a lesson he learned along his way: "Often the only way to keep that which we hold most dear is to give it away." He was talking about his medals. Or was he?